Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
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Saturday, June 28, 2014

It has just been revealed by the
Pentagon via the U.S. “news” media that armed (killer) drones
have been flying over Baghdad as of several days ago “to protect
Americans.” To one who remembers the history of the U.S.
“intervention” in Iraq, that is chilling. In the name of
preventing U.S. casualties, a value of zero was placed on Iraqi life.
Thus numerous civilians were butchered, including at “checkpoints”
where their cars would be shot up, killing and maiming the drivers
and passengers on the chance that they might be suicide bombers. The
U.S. military’s “rules of engagement” were designed to minimize
risk of U.S. casualties which meant maximizing Iraqi civilian ones.
[1]

And the New York Times let slip
in the last paragraph of an editorial, inside parentheses, that on
top of the 300 American “advisers” Obama sent into Iraq, (who
will be calling in airstrikes, among other duties, and directing
Maliki’s troops on who to kill) the U.S. emperor is also sending
what the Times misleadingly calls “private security guards”
to bodyguard the “advisers.”[2]

Well, these no doubt aren’t the guys
hired to stand at the doors in mall stores to deter shoplifters.
These are those “private security contractors” that the U.S. has
long used as a shadow army in Iraq. Like the Blackwater Butchers of
the Nisur Square massacre in Baghdad, a notorious mass murder.
Accompanying State Department officials they were bodyguarding, the
Blackwater Butchers apparently were impatient with a traffic jam and
so opened fire in a murderous frenzy on the Iraqis helplessly trapped
in their cars, killing 17, including children, and wounding others.
The Iraqi traffic police on the scene had to run for their lives. The
U.S. Army arrived on the scene of the massacre after the Blackwater
Butchers had fled, and concluded that no one had fired on the
Blackwater/State Dept. convoy.

Another example of the U.S. “warriors’”
attitude towards Iraqis was revealed by the infamous video of the
U.S. Army helicopter assault on the Reuters’ crew walking in the
street in Baghdad, and then the firing on a civilian van whose driver
stopped to help the dying men. The helicopter crew makes callous
cracks about the children in the van who they wound, sneering that
the driver shouldn’t have brought children into a “combat zone.”
(Of course the U.S. turned every square inch of Iraq into a “combat
zone.”) The only soldier ever punished for that wanton atrocity and
war crime was the soldier who exposed it by sending the helicopter
video to WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, sentenced to 35 years in
military prison for his awful crime of revealing the murders. [3]

The Times editorial feeds the
reader this standard U.S. government guff: “Obama administration
officials have said any strikes will depend on factors like support
from Iraq’s political leaders and intelligence that
identifies precise ISIS targets.” [Emphases added.]

Yeah, right. they’re so
“precise.” Why, their bombs and missiles are downright
“surgical,” they claim. So does that mean that all those
civilians you blow to pieces were deliberately slaughtered,
America?

We’ve had numerous examples over the
past 13 years of how reliable U.S. “intelligence” is, from the
bogus “intel” used as a pretext to invade Iraq, to the random
civilians (some bought with bounty money from the Pakis and from
Afghan marauders) murdered in U.S. captivity or sent to rot at
Guantanamo Bay, to the cruise missile and drone attacks that have
repeatedly slaughtered villagers and wedding parties, to the night
raids like the one in Gardez, Afghanistan in which U.S. “Special
Forces” (death squad) troops murdered the local police commander
and two pregnant women, then blamed it on the Taliban.

In Yemen, the corrupt Yemeni rulers
have bumped off political rivals, including government officials, by
whispering in the U.S.’ ear that their cars were terrorist
caravans. (The Wall Street Journal exposed this years ago on
its front page, describing a specific example at the time the
loathsome Ali Abdullah Saleh was “president.”)

Then there’s just the general
bloodthirstiness of U.S. “elite” troops and “private security
contractors” like the cutthroats of Blackwater. (Now called
Academi, after cycling through other name changes like Xe designed to
flee from its murderous reputation. Here’s a suggestion to its
boss, the fanatical reactionary and ex-Navy SEAL Eric Prince, for his
next corporate disguise: just call yourselves John Doe Inc.)

Since American life is precious (well,
as long as they’re Americans in good standing with the
Imperialist-Corporate state; the lives of people like Michael
Hastings, or Rachel Corrie, or Americans foolish enough to try and
sail humanitarian supplies to Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza
strip aren’t worth bupkis) and the lives of Third Worlders
like Iraqis, or Vietnamese, or Salvadoreans, or Angolans, aren’t
just expendable, but are treated as having negative value,
like trash or a form of insect life, slaughter is deemed reasonable
under the “rules of engagement” that are crafted to keep U.S.
casualties to an absolute minimum.

This has a political dimension, based
on the knowledge that the U.S. public doesn’t give a rats’ ass
how many non-Americans the U.S. kills, it only cares about “our
side” losing bodies. That’s how they keep score. As the rulers
learned during the Vietnam War, American body bags = more opposition
to war. (Oh, how happy everyone was when the U.S. conquered Grenada!
And iraq too, until the going got rougher.) With 5,000 Americans at
the world’s largest U.S. embassy in Baghdad, there will be plenty
of opportunities to kill Iraqis “just to be on the safe side.”

3] There
are many copies of the “collateral murder” video on youtube.com,
released by WikiLeaks in 2010, including a full length one The
murders occurred in 2007. See
“Original Wikileaks 'Collateral Murder' Video.”
You can hear these vicious killers saying things like “C’mon, let
us shoot!” to their controllers back at their base. They falsely
claim to be shooting armed insurgents.

Friday, June 27, 2014

That’s the latest cumulative tally as
Israel continues to rampage in the West Bank, furious over what it
calls the “kidnapping” of three Israeli Jewish teenage colonists
who went missing while hitchhiking several weeks ago. No one has
issued any messages claiming to have seized them, or issued any
demands. Israel vociferously asserts that Hamas kidnapped them,
which Hamas denies. [1]

The toll of dead and newly-imprisoned
Palestinians added to Israel’s permanent cache of thousands of
Palestinian prisoners (most of whom are never charged with a crime,
much less tried and convicted, which makes them state hostages) will
continue to grow, as Israel goes berserk over the three missing
Jewish teenage colonizers of the West Bank (“Judea and Samaria”
in official Israeli rhetoric); kicking down the doors to people’s
homes, ransacking them, breaking the stealing Palestinians’
possessions and carting off “suspects” without explanation,
leaving families terrorized and traumatized. (The condition Israel
has employed much violence over the years to put Palestinians in,
starting with the violent ethnic cleansing of 1948 as a key,
premeditated part of the much-lauded creation of the State of
Israel.)

In reaction to the disappearance of
their boys, Israel has already killed twice as many Palestinians
(teens and young men) as the number of Jewish teenaged colonists
whose disappearance it is avenging. And there will be more killed and
imprisoned. The moral perversion, not just in Israel but in those
nations that back it, is that the colonizers are the moral ones and
the colonized who resist their dispossession are the evil ones.
That’s not an endorsement of kidnapping or violence. Violence is
always ugly, and kidnapping is ruthless. So is demolishing tens of
thousands of people’s homes with bulldozers, uprooting their
orchards, imprisoning them to crush their political organizing,
shooting and beating demonstrators, and bombing refugee camps and
hospitals. If anything, the seizing of three Israeli colonizers,
tragic as it is for the kidnapped and their families, is a feeble
response to all the Palestinians, now imprisoned in their nascent
Bantustans, have endured for 66 years with no end in sight.

It seems to me that Israel’s violent
response makes it more likely that whoever presumably seized the 3
teenagers are now going to feel more pressure to kill them, if they
haven’t already, since they will fear being captured and Israel is
making it harder to move their prisoners around. Israel would have
been better off offering a reward for their safe return, or a
prisoner swap. But that would be “weak” and “only encourage
more kidnappings,” in the mindset of the tough guys who run the
Israeli state. Making the political point that Palestinian resistance
is intolerable is the Israelis’ imperative, and thus any act
by Palestinians contrary to Israeli demands, whether constructing a
home, a peaceful demonstration, lobbing a homemade rocket onto
Israeli soil, or seizing or killing Israeli Jews, will be met with
the mailed fist. Forcing the Palestinians to knuckle under, and
“proving” to them the futility of resistance, takes precedence
over the safe return of the 3 teens.

1] My guess is that if a
Palestinian political group did seize them, it would have been one of
the smaller, more extreme groups, not Hamas. Hamas has just entered
into a political unity government with the “Palestinian Authority”
run by Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas. They wouldn’t want to destabilize
it just weeks after its formation. Israel is using the boys’
disappearance as a wedge to try and pry apart the new unity between
the two main Palestinian factions to once again keep the Palestinians
divided and even weaker than they are. Once again Netanyahu is
issuing thunderous demands that Hamas be thrown out of the
Palestinian “government,” such as it is.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

As I previously wrote about, three
journalists working for Al-Jazeera, the Qatari-owned news
organization, were convicted in an Egyptian kangaroo court of
“broadcasting false information” for the “terrorist” Muslim
Brotherhood. Two were sentenced to 7 years, and the third got an
extra 3 years for the “crime” of possessing an empty bullet shell
casing he had as a souvenir. (Come to think of it, the same thing
could happen in the U.S., particularly if you’re a black or
leftist.)

Nine other journalists (among 20 other
defendants) have been sentenced to 10 years in absentia,
including a Dutch journalist who had to flee the country with the
help of her embassy in Cairo. None of these people dare travel to
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or the “United Arab Emirates” (a
collection of medieval Arab monarchs), for those three are paymasters
of the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt an despise the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nor can they now travel anywhere in Africa, as the gang of African
rulers have welcomes the Egyptian regime into their fold, and are
bound to hand over Egyptian convicts to Egypt should any land in
their territories. Here is another example of human beings held
hostage to the vagaries of the politics of national rulers. We are
like corks in the ocean, tossed about by forces much larger than
ourselves.

New Egyptian military dictator Abdel
Fattah El-Sisi hates Qatar for supporting the government he
overthrew, the elected Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed
Morsi. (Who Sisi threw in prison after his coup.) The imprisonment of
Al-Jazeera is Sisi’s petty, vindictive way to last out at Qatar.
Except it doesn’t hurt Qatar, just the journalists and their
families. (Similarly, Bill Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq didn’t
hurt Saddam Hussein, but they sure hurt the over half a million Iraqi
children Clinton thereby murdered, and their families.)

Secretary of State John “I’m a Hawk
Now!” Kerry had a congenial meeting with military dictator

Sisi the day before the “verdict.”

The Obama regime has cleared $575
million worth of military armaments for the Egyptian military
dictatorship, strengthening its repressive hold on that country.
Apache attack helicopters are being delivered for use inside
Egypt (since Egypt is not going to attack any external enemies, nor
be invaded by any) against any rebellious Egyptians. Since actions
speak louder than words, and what a military dictatorship craves
above all else is weapons and munitions, we can discount whatever
hypocritical, cynical, phony, insincere “expressions of concern”
the Obama regime will emit. It’s just the usual U.S. guff.

But to be fair to Obama, he supports
regimes that are a lot more repressive towards journalists than Egypt
is. So why can’t he back Egypt’s repression too? Obama supported
the Honduran coup, and supports the government there, which MURDERS
journalists (and many other people also). He of course supports the
Guatemalan permanent fascist military government, which murders
journalists (and many others) routinely. He’s a big fan of the
Colombian rulers, who murder many journalists (and union organizers
and others). Why not Egypt? All they did was imprison some
journalists- and ones working for the hated-by-the-U.S. Al-Jazeera,
to boot.

And Obama himself imprisons
journalists. So you could say he’s avoiding being hypocritical (for
once) by not opposing Sisi for doing what Obama does. (Although
saying that would be a bit perverse. Or ironic, if you prefer.) Obama
has imprisoned an Al-Jazeera employee in his military gulag torture
center at Guantanamo Bay in U.S.-occupied Cuban territory. He ordered
the U.S.-client regime in Yemen to imprison the reporter who dared
expose a drone attack atrocity by the U.S. He criminally investigates
U.S. journalists, such as the Fox “News” reporter who was
targeted. (Numerous Fox phone lines were tapped in that
“investigation.”) He surreptitiously obtained voluminous AP phone
records to track down and persecute an unauthorized leaker. He is
trying to force New York Times reporter James Risen to testify
in a criminal persecution of a former government employee in another
unauthorized leak case. (Risen faces imprisonment if he refuses to
testify- the Supreme Court just rejected his last attempt to quash
the subpoena demanding his testimony.) [1]

Obama’s lawyers reserved the right in
court to imprison journalists (and anyone else) in a military gulag,
indefinitely, without charges, under the section of the “National
Defense Authorization Act” that he sneakily signed into law on the
last day of 2012 (New Year’s Eve, trying to sneak under the media
radar). Obama’s lawyers did this in the course of defending against
a lawsuit brought by American dissidents (including Chris Hedges and
Noam Chomsky) challenging the Constitutionality of this totalitarian
law.

So no one should expect Obama or his
henchmen like Skull and Bonesman Kerry to man the ramparts for
journalistic freedom. People like that use the media to plant their
propaganda, but despise it for acting independently.

1] Here is an excerpt from an
interview conducted by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! with
journalist Jeremy Scahill and filmmaker Rick Rowley about their film
“Dirty Wars.” It starts with a description of a U.S.
military death squad raid on the home of an Afghan police chief
(which was a “mistake,” apparently) and the murder of the chief
and several pregnant women during a family celebration. This occurred
in Gardez. The soldiers then conspire to concoct a cover story,
digging bullets out of their victims’ bodies. (Rowley subsequently
obtained cellphone videos shot surreptitiously by survivors in the
house recording the voices of the soldiers and showing their hands
tampering with the corpses.) NATO then put out a cover story blaming
the butchery on the Taliban. However one journalist acted as an
actual journalist instead of as a stenographer for official
propaganda. He was then branded a liar and his character
assassinated.

Scahill then discusses the case of a
Yemeni journalist who exposed Obama atrocities against Yemeni
villagers, blowing the Yemeni government’s lies that it was their
own airstrikes against “terrorist training camps,” not U.S.
cruise missile and drone attacks which massacred civilians. (In one
case the target was a retired veteran of the U.S.-backed jihadist war
against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, who could have easily
been arrested in the village where he lived.) Obama had this
journalist imprisoned to silence him.

Monday, June 23, 2014

As U.S.-installed dictator of Iraq Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki loses his grip on more of Iraq, including the last
border crossing with Syria, to the “Islamic State In Syria and
Iraq” and other Sunni armed groups, including Baathists, he is
falling back on the only thing he knows, besides blatant theft:
namely murder.

A cryptic report on the BBC said that
70 “terrorist prisoners” were killed “in transit” when
“gunmen” attacked. No guards reported killed, no gunmen reported
killed, no explanation of who they were or why they attacked and
killed prisoners, and why they were allowed to. No skepticism by BBC
towards this extremely dubious claim by the Maliki regime.

One of two things happened: Maliki had
the (Sunni political) prisoners killed by those transporting them, or
it was arranged for a Shiite “militia” or some Malaki-regime
U.S.-trained death squad to rendezvous with the guards and murder the
prisoners.

And Maliki’s helicopters attacked
civilian cars lined up at a gas station. (No doubt the pilots were
Shiites, who wanted to kill Sunnis, any Sunnis.) Maliki’s regime
called the victims “terrorists.” No word on BBC, NPR, et al.
I only heard this on “alternative” (non-establishment) Democracy
Now today, (Democracynow.org.)

Meanwhile Secretary of State John “I’m
a Hawk Now!” Kerry flew into Baghdad to jawbone Maliki about being
more “inclusive,” a joke almost as sick as Kerry’s “peace
process” with Israel and the Palestinian “Authority.” At the
same time, the Obama regime keeps dropping hints that maybe it would
be better if someone else became “prime minister” of Iraq
now. Typical Hamlet-like behavior by Obama.

On the other hand, Iran is clear and
decisive (as in Syria too, also in contrast with the dithering,
indecisive U.S.) The real boss of Iran, the Big Ayatollah, says
Maliki must stay in power. This is a reflection of the fact that
Maliki evolved into more of an Iranian client than a U.S. one, even
though U.S. weapons, and training in murder and mayhem, still props
up Maliki’s venal and cruel regime.

The U.S. has had similar relationships
with Maliki, with Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and with the Pakistani
military. In all three cases, the clients somehow seem to have had
the upper hand in the relationships. The U.S. propped up, funded, and
armed all of them, in return for consistent kicks in the teeth by
Karzai and the Pakis, and cozying up to hated U.S. enemy and bete
noire Iran in the case of Maliki. Perhaps the U.S. got into the
bad habit of being others’ bitch from it relationship with Israel.
[1]

If I were a U.S. media propagandist,
I’d be tempted to resort to a superficial pop psychology
explanation, as they do with Putin and leftist opponents,
among others. One could liken the U.S. to a powerful man, a plutocrat
or politician, with a hidden submissive sex life, who patronizes
dominatrixes in secret. But I won’t, because that’s silly (if
amusing). I think the actual explanation is complex, with many
political factors, both domestic and international, exerting
influences. A political analysis, not a psychological one, especially
not a shallow and glib pop-psychological one, is what is called for
here. Perhaps I will provide one at another time.

There is a parallel with “South”
Vietnam, a U.S.-created artificial nation that came into being when
the U.S. sawed Vietnam in half after the French defeat at Dien Bien
Phu in 1954. That battle ended the attempt of imperialist France to
reconquer its erstwhile Indochinese colonies, which Imperial Japan
had seized in World War Two. (France wheezed another last gasp of its
formal imperialism in Algeria, where through massive torture by the
French army, the Algerian independence movement was temporarily
suppressed.) At the ensuing Geneva, Switzerland, conference to decide
Vietnam’s fate, China sold out the Vietnamese so-called
“communists” and went along with a U.S. scheme to “temporarily”
divide Vietnam in half, with elections to follow in two years, at
which point the country would be “reunited.” Since Ho Chi Minh
was projected to win 80% of the vote in a nationwide election, U.S.
president Dwight “Watch Out For the Military-Industrial Complex!”
Eisenhower made sure to subsequently kill the election and set up a
permanent client regime in the southern half of the country. When two
decades later, after slaughtering millions of Vietnamese, committing
innumerable atrocities and war crimes, dropping three times the
tonnage of bombs on Vietnam as it dropped in World War II, and
poisoning the land with dioxin, creating a toxic legacy that produces
thousands of birth defects to this day from permanent damage to the
human gene pool, the U.S. was forced to pull out its expeditionary
force, the “South” Vietnamese army collapsed like a house of
cards in a few weeks in 1975 when the northern half’s army launched
an offensive. [2]

Likewise the “Iraqi” army of Nuri
al-Maliki, 350,000 strong, built up at a cost of $42 billion in the
last three years alone, is incapable of even fighting, much less
defeating, a few thousand fanatical Islamofascist terrorists.
Because, as in the “South” Vietnamese army’s case, conscripts
won’t risk their lives fighting for a venal dictator for whom
loyalty and service are one-way streets.

1] If
one wanted to blame a single person for foisting both Karzai and
Maliki on the United States, the culprit would be Bush family
henchman Zalmay Khalilzad. As U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan
under the regime of Bush the Younger, Khalilzad tapped Karzai to be
installed as president there. Later, when Bush moved him to the
ambassador role in Iraq, he recommended Maliki to Bush as prime
minister of Iraq. O for two, Zalmay.

Here’s a portion of an interview on
Democracy Now! with Harper’s magazine Washington
editor Andrew Cockburn that is packed with information on Khalilzad
and is a good description of the relevant history in a nutshell:

[ANDREW COCKBURN]: “Maliki
is in power, really, thanks to the—thanks to the U.S. Zalmay
Khalilzad, then the ambassador to Baghdad, in 2006 selected Maliki,
much to everyone’s surprise, including Maliki’s. When Khalilzad
said, "How would you like to be prime minister?" Maliki
said, "Are you serious?" So, and then that was reaffirmed
again in 2010 when Maliki had basically lost an election, and the
U.S. and Iran, for that matter—further ironies here—really
got—really rammed him back down the throats of the Iraqi people.
So, now to be saying, you know, Maliki has to go, as I say, is rich
with irony.

[JUAN GONZÁLEZ]: “And
your article on Khalilzad also talks about his influence in
Afghanistan, as well. Could you talk a little bit about his history?

[ANDREW COCKBURN]: “Well,
Khalilzad, yeah, he’s been a sort of longtime foot soldier in the
neocon, neoconservative, movement. I mean, he has a sort of pretty
grisly pedigree. He, early on—I mean, he’s an Afghan, and then
made his way to the U.S. as a young man, as a bright student. And
from there, he fell under the influence of Albert Wohlstetter, who
was a character in Chicago who was very influential in the movement,
who also mentored Richard Perle.

“And then you see
Khalilzad—from the beginning of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan,
he’s very much in the mix. He claims now to have been instrumental
in sort of directing the whole policy, which I don’t think is
really the case. But anyway, there he was signing all the
resolutions, calling for war with—overthrowing Saddam, and so
forth.

“And his moment came in
2001, or after 2001, when we, you know, successfully toppled the
Taliban regime, and Khalilzad was really only the Afghan or sort of
pretty much the only Muslim any of these people knew, and so they
appointed him the overseer of the post-Taliban Afghanistan, from
which position he selected one Hamid Karzai—again, much to the
subsequent grief of U.S. administrations—really with the view of—a
lot of Afghans I talked to at the time thought, well, Karzai was a
fairly weak figure, and Khalilzad’s idea was that he, Khalilzad,
would be the real ruler of Afghanistan and behave like that, really.
He was bossing all them, and he restored—he fostered all these
ghastly warlords and strongmen, with himself really as the biggest
warlord of all. He’d threaten them with airstrikes and so forth.
[U.S. power attracts gangsta wannabe types as imperialist
apparatchiks- JZ.]

“So, after he had pretty
much ensured that no stable settlement would emerge in Afghanistan,
and really his actions had led to the revival of the Taliban, he
failed upwards and was moved to Iraq, where the U.S. was trying to
sort of put in place some kind of government that they could entrust
Iraq to. And as I said, they didn’t like the man they had, a prime
minister called Jaafari. And Khalilzad looked around and selected
this character, al-Maliki, who was a fairly comparatively obscure
figure in the—had been in the exiled opposition. He had lived in
Damascus for most of his adult life, running a butcher shop. And
suddenly, as I say, he called in al-Maliki.

“And, actually, I know
quite a lot about the scene. He was with the British ambassador, and
they started talking. And when the ambassador realized, the British
ambassador realized that, my god, this character Maliki was being
offered the job of leading Iraq, he started to protest, whereupon
Khalilzad kicked him out of the room and then turned to Maliki and
said, "Would you like to be prime minister?" And as I said
earlier, Maliki said, "Are you serious?" And it turned out
he was.

“So, there was Maliki in
power, having made all sorts of promises, like they’re demanding
now, that he would reach out to the Sunni minority, that he would
respect human rights, he would stand up to Iran, and so forth—all
of which promises, of course, he immediately broke. And, you know,
he’s just a very narrow-minded, very sectarian, very paranoid
character.”

But that’s only if we believe the New
York Times report on Chalabi meeting with U.S. officials, which
Chalabi himself may have planted there, Cockburn speculates. You
would HOPE that the NY Times, having made itself a platform
for Chalabi-originated disinformation on Iraq in 2002-3 to provoke a
U.S. invasion, would do some verification of a story from Chalabi,
but knowing the Times, one never knows.

2] Here’s in part the version
of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. State Department of the
Geneva deal and what the U.S. did afterwards. It’s rather
revealing:

“In the wake of the
French defeat, the French and Vietnamese, along with representatives
from the United States and China, met in Geneva in mid-1954 to
discuss the future of Indochina. They reached two agreements. First,
the French and the Viet Minh agreed to a cease-fire and a temporary
division of the country along the 17th parallel. French forces would
remain in the South, and Ho Chi Minh’s forces would control the
North. The second agreement promised that neither the North nor the
South would join alliances with outside parties, and called for
general elections in 1956. Laos and Cambodia were to remain neutral.

“The United States did
not sign the second agreement, establishing instead its own
government in South Vietnam. As the French pulled out, the United
States appointed Ngo Dinh Diem to lead South Vietnam. Like Bao
Dai, Diem was an unpopular choice in Vietnam as he had waited out the
nationalist struggle against France abroad. Diem had also
collaborated with the Japanese occupation, but his Catholicism
appealed to the Western powers. The United States also supported the
formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, designed to
respond if there was an armed attack on any nation in the region.”
[Emphases mine.]

Saturday, June 21, 2014

The current “crisis” in Iraq is
directly a result of the acts of the regime of Bush the Younger. Yet
not only have elected politicians and media mouthpieces of the
political party of that regime, the Republican Party, been
shamelessly attacking (and blaming) the Democratic Party president of
the U.S. for the teetering regime of sectarian dictator Nuri
al-Maliki, but amazingly, actual architects of the current “crisis”
are making the rounds of reactionary media (and that includes ALL the
major media organs in the U.S., in whole or in large part) to beat
their chests and attack Obama.

So for example the sinister Richard
Cheney, Bush the Younger’s Vice President and eminense grise, has
been on television to opine. Of course it was the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, masterminded by Cheney and War Secretary Donald “The
Infallible” Rumsfeld, that destabilized Iraq and brought the ethnic
and religious fissures to the fore. It was also the Bush regime that
anointed Maliki boss of Iraq, an absolutely absurd choice. (Although
no more absurd than their original choice, the embezzler, con man,
and peddler of disinformation Ahmed Chalabi- whose name is now being
bruited about as a replacement for Maliki! Never mind the past, never
mind U.S. accusations that he was an Iranian agent, after they
eventually fell out with him.) [1]

Then we’ve also
been treated by the arch-reactionary Wall Street Journal (the
main ideological organ of finance capital in the U.S.) to the
opinions of L. Paul Bremer, invited to have an op-ed piece under his
name in that rag. Bremer is the Bush family crony and spoiled rich
boy who was made proconsul of Iraq with absolute powers after the
U.S. conquest and occupation. In that role, he was unfailingly unable
to make a correct decision. One of his biggest blunders, which went
against the advice of even the U.S. military, was the total
disbandment of the Iraqi army. That led to much grief in the
following years and is cited today by experts as a reason for the
current mess. (Peter Dale Scott cites an author who claims that
Cheney ordered Bremer to disband the Iraqi army.)

For good measure,
Bush’s Poodle, the loathsome, oleaginous Tony Blair, former Prime
Minister of (not) “Great” Britain, immediately popped up like a
Jack-in-the-Box to insist that “we” don’t “blame ourselves”
for the breakdown in Iraq. (“We” meaning him.) The British
propaganda system dutifully did its part, broadcasting his crudely
self-serving exhortation while ignoring how he was exposed and
totally discredited as a man who “fixed” the “intel”
(Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Tenet-style) to lie his country into war as the
loyal parrot on the shoulder of the U.S. pirate. (Is there any
country the U.S. would invade that the British, the Australians, and
the Canadians won’t contribute troops to? The Canadians did beg off
in the Vietnam war, but still...) Blair is now piling up millions of
dollars (or pounds or euros or whatever he’s paid in) flacking and
shilling for various awful dictators, why cynically spouting off
about “human rights” and “freedom” and “democracy,” all
the buzzwords of Western politician-hustlers, assiduously debasing
the language by rendering the meaning of those words hollow.

How do they get
away with it? Because the U.S. media (and this is largely true in
Europe and in Latin America too) is overwhelmingly reactionary, to
such an extent that these sleazy, dishonest, immoral criminals are
treated with respect and allowed to make absurd claims and have their
numerous lies go unchallenged. In fact, it’s so bad in the U.S.
that Bush himself is allowed to get away with the outrageous lie that
Saddam Hussein “wouldn’t allow [UN weapons’ inspectors] into
Iraq.” In fact the inspectors returned to Iraq, and Bush forced
them out and then attacked and invaded the country. But the corporate
propaganda system would like as many people as possible to have false
history planted in their brains. Yet they insist on pretending they
are “news” organizations and their propagandists are “objective
journalists” who report “facts” and seek “truth.” Sorry,
when you transmit blatant lies to millions of people without pointing
out the falsity, you are “journalists” and that isn’t “news.”
It is propaganda and brainwashing.

What one sees in Bushies is a dangerous
combination of the following traits: mediocrity, utter lack of
modesty, overweening self-confidence, inability to experience shame
or remorse. You can see how those traits are linked and
mutually-reinforcing.

The explanation for the existence of
these malign character traits is “breeding.” That is, the life
experience of these members of the power-controlling class is that
they are born into great wealth and privilege. They are the
spawn of a self-perpetuating class of oligarchs.

Chris Hedges gave an interesting description
of the psychology of these creatures in an interview with Paul Jay.
Here’s the excerpt from the interview:

1] And just to make sure we
don’t forget, Cheney became vice president after Bush appointed him
to head a “search committee” to find the “best person” to be
vice president, and Cheney reported back to Bush that the best man
for the job was none other than Cheney himself! And Bush agreed!!

Cheney of course never stopped
considering Nelson Mandela a “terrorist.” Cheney is a lifelong
operative of the U.S. fascist deep state, and as such is a
conspirator in many dark crimes and plots, including the demolition
by nano-thermite explosives of the three (not two) buildings that
suddenly collapsed at the World Trade Center in New York City This is
not my opinion. This is the finding of over 1,000 architects,
structural engineers, demolition experts, and others. And there were
numerous witnesses who heard the explosions. See “9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out (Full),” on
youtube.com.

Cheney, in addition to the 9/11 plot
and the invasion of Iraq conspiracy, is a key figure in the covert
military-police state euphemistically called “Continuity Of
Government,” or COG for short. Peter Dale Scott has a number of
talks and interviews on this topic. See for example “Peter Dale Scott 2010 ‘Continuity of Government,’" on youtube.com.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Yeah, that should do a lot to shore up the venal Maliki regime. Let's see, four out of fourteen of Maliki's army divisions melted like butter when confronted by a few thousand terrorists. I guess 300 American soldiers should turn the tide.

Since one of their tasks will be to "advise" the Iraqi military, may I suggest that a good piece of advice is, At the first sign of the enemy, don't tear off your uniform, throw down your weapon, and run away. (Which is what actually happened.) And it's been reported that Iraqi troops in Baghdad are wearing civvies under their uniforms, just in case.

Well, at least the Kurds have their act together. The idea that the northern Kurdish region of Iraq is still part of "Iraq" is nothing but a legal fiction at this point.

However, Baghdad is safe from conquest by the Islamofascist ISIS.. It is too large, and there are thousands of armed Shiite militia volunteers there, for the Sunni terrorists of the "Islamic State of of Iraq and Syria" (aka ISIS) to conquer. In fact, it would be a good thing if they tried, since a bunch of them would get killed. But I'm afraid they're too cunning for that.

However, they have been seizing towns around Baghdad, which presents a threat of possibly cutting off supplies to the city. And they've mostly seized the main oil refinery in the country, although apparently Maliki's strategy there is to set it ablaze to deny the terrorists its use.

Endless destruction is the sorry fate of Iraq since Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran in 1980, it seems.

Obama keeps prattling about "protecting American interests." As is customary whenever a politician or the media invokes "American interests," we are never told just what those "interests" are. We the citizens are treated like small children, without the capacity or maturity to understand such adult things,

Of course the real reason is that these cynical imperialist bastards don't want the public to understand the world as it really is. Hell, they might even have a harder time getting "patriotic" idiots to be their cannon fodder/killers for them, if that happened!

But eventually the Sunnis will be forced to turn on these terrorists again, just as happened during the U.S. occupation, when they were calling themselves "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." Even then, the original Al-Qaeda had a problem with their savagery and tried to rein them in. Now Al-Qaeda has disavowed this descendant of AQIM. But the U.S. media, and politicians up to and including Obama, will ignore that fact. They need to keep pretending it's all "Al-Qaeda" ("and associated forces," a little legalistic clause Obama habitually adds, to cover himself for whoever he wants to kill), to keep it black and white. This is the "war on terrorism," remember, one of those endless wars, like the "war on drugs," or the 70 year "war on communism." Imperialists are like shyster salesmen peddling junk- they need a good story to sell their crap to people.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

U.S.-installed Iraqi dictator Nuri al-Maliki (Bush picked him) is once again urging the U.S. to bomb his country since he is so despised even by his fellow majority Shiites that he can't even prevent a few thousand Sunni Islamofascist fanatics of "the Islamic State In Syria and Iraq" from taking over larger swaths of Iraq.

Now the terrorists have seized the country's largest oil refinery. In response, one of Maliki's helicopter gunships fired a missile into an oil storage tank, sparking a conflagration. Way to go! Now Iraqis can breathe more polluted air, in addition to their other numerous health woes- like the skyhigh rate of grotesque birth defects in places like Fallujah, caused by U.S. depleted uranium munitions (radiation damages DNA, creating hereditary damage to the human genome, a crime against our species), maimed bodies from the U.S. invasion and internecine warfare and sectarian terrorism, and the effects of malnutrition and disease from years of cruel U.S. sanctions imposed by Bush the Elder and Clinton.

Obama is once again doing some serious mulling over what to do. Meanwhile, the usual chorus of reactionaries and militaristic imperialist fanatics are yelling at him to Attack Attack Attack! And blaming him for the mess Bush created because he didn't ram a permanent occupation force down Iraq's throat and somehow force Maliki to grant the U.S. troops immunity to commit crimes freely, which is why Obama pulled the troops out. (As usual, the Democrats are too lame to push back forcefully against the Republicans.)

Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner, an ignorant hack GOP politician from Ohio who is known for playing golf and not much else, has weighed in to warn Obama against cooperating with Iran in any way, shape or form to beat back the Sunni terrorists in Iraq, despite Iranian feelers. Boehner says Iran is beyond the pale because it "supports terrorism" in Syria, Lebanon, "and in Israel." Funny how other nations stubbornly keep trying to help the U.S., even though the U.S. never reciprocates and is always ungrateful. You'd have thought Iran would have learned that lesson right after 9/11/01, when they helped the U.S. against the Taliban and were repaid for their aid by being branded by Bush the Younger as part of a mythical "Axis of Evil" along with the Iranians' arch-enemy, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, and North Korea (sic!).

Obama's War Secretary Chuck "Wagon" Hagel repeated the Obama regime's line that the solution was political, not military. Somehow Maliki, who has persecuted the Sunni leadership of the country relentlessly, is supposed to be more "inclusive" now. As I've written before, this is idiotically far behind the curve. Rather like "restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process." You can't breathe life into long-dead political corpses. Perhaps Obama's nickname should be Dr. Frankenstein. Only Frankenstein was effective.

That brings the total to 260. 50 of the newly-seized hostages were recently freed prisoners. Israel routinely reimprisons Palestinians they've previously released in various swaps with the Palestinians, whether to free an Israeli captured by Palestinians, or to get the Palestinian "leadership" to go along with the cruel charade of "peace talks." So the Israeli are replenishing their hostage bank, Now with about 90 Palestinian prisoners seized for each of the 3 Israeli teenagers gone missing in the occupied West Bank and presumed kidnapped, there is plenty of bartering tender- not to mention the thousands of Palestinians already in Israeli captivity at any given time, the majority political prisoners not tried or convicted of any alleged offense.

But for now, the Israelis are using the hostages to try and extract information, and as a way to put pressure on the Palestinian community to give up information about the Israeli teens.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

In a frenzy over the disappearance and presumed kidnapping of 3 Jewish teenage West Bank colonizers, Israel has seized over 200 Palestinians as hostages, including the speaker of the Palestinian parliament, and killed one Palestinian (so far). But this Nazi-style response doesn't trouble the U.S. media. Israeli Jews are humans "like us." To the U.S. media, Palestinians are a faceless mob, angrily chanting fanatical jibberish, subhumans, terrorists, not people.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has already blamed Hamas for the putative kidnappings (Hamas denies it) and threatened Palestinian "Authority" "President" Mahmoud Abbas, saying Abbas is responsible for the safe return of the teens. (As if any political boss is omnipotent in the area they hold political authority over. Of course Abbas doesn't even really have authority there, Israel does.)

I think Israeli Jews would be a lot safer behind the wall they built (which stole a bunch of Palestinian farm land outside the so-called "Green Line," which is the actual legal, internationally-recognized border of Israel) instead of relentlessly absorbing more land where other people already live. They've been driving Palestinians out of their homes- and they've bulldozed tens of thousands of those homes in recent decades with armored bulldozers purchased with U.S. tax dollars from a U.S. corporation, Caterpillar. They used one of those 'dozers to murder an American, Rachel Corrie. Not the first American murdered by Israel (see the attack in the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967, best recounted in the book by a U.S. naval officer who survived the lengthy daylight attack, Assault on the Liberty) and won't be the last, in all probability. (A dual-U.S.-Turkish citizen was one of the 10 people killed in the last Israeli attack on a relief flotilla that tried to defy the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.)

Monday, June 16, 2014

Days after Pakistani Taliban terrorists
attacked the Karachi international airport, and followed up with an
attack on the airport security guard training center, the U.S.
stirred the pot by launching two drone strikes on Pakistani
territory, killing 14. This marks the end of a “pause” in U.S.
drone attacks in Pakistan that was in effect since last December,
when the Paki civilian government asked the U.S. to stop the aerial
terror campaign while the government negotiated with the Paki
Taliban.

If the U.S. wanted to inflame the
situation in Pakistan, they couldn’t have picked a more effective
act than these latest assassinations.

In fact, in taking credit for the
airport attack, the Paki Taliban cited as a reason
the U.S. drone assassination of their leader Hakimullah
Mehsud, last year.So now
the U.S. doubles down on
provocation. What it hopes to gain by repeatedly throwing stones at a
beehive is truly inscrutable. [1]

You’d think the
U.S. had a deliberate policy of trying to help Islamofascists
take over Pakistan, a country with an arsenal of nuclear weapons!

If the idea is to
force the Paki army to fight the Islamofascists, the Obama regime
should leak word of that strategy through “unnamed White House
officials” or whoever to the Washington Post or the NewYork Times, those two bulletin boards for U.S. government
messages to the American bourgeois elite. So far, nothing.

Here’s an idea:
instead of violently meddling in the affairs of other nations,
let the people there sort things out. If the goal is to prevent
an Islamofascist takeover of Pakistan, making the Pakistani people
hate the U.S. more and more with a drone terror campaign, while also
exposing the Paki government as impotent to protect them from foreign
aerial attack, is exactly the WRONG way to go about it!

Every tactical
victory won by bumping off a terrorist leader, who is immediately
replaced by a new leader, is another nail hammered into the coffin of
U.S. strategic defeat against the jihadist fanatics. As in Vietnam,
the U.S. is losing a war while winning every battle. More of the
world is under the sway of Islamofascists now than when Obama started
his dirty work. I think failure speaks for itself. The time to come
up with a strategy, instead of turning professional assassins
loose and calling it a policy, is long past. [2]

And how’s this
for a bitter irony: part of Obama’s pitch in replacing Bush was
that he would, to use the verbiage we were fed, “restore America’s
standing in the world,” in other words, fix the U.S’s image.
And Obama’s erstwhile Secretary of State, the lifelong relentless
self-promoter and manipulator Hillary Clinton, is currently promoting
a book written for her by her drones (but with her name on the cover
as the ostensible author) in which she brags about the great job she
did improving the view foreigners hold of the U.S.

This practice of
duping world opinion with U.S. national propaganda and brainwashing
operations is euphemistically labeled “public diplomacy” by those
who commit it. It is aimed at everyone on earth, both Americans and
non-Americans. [3]

But of course all
that could only ever be a con job, given that the U.S. had no
intention of reforming itself and not being an imperialist power
anymore, ending its support for horrible tyrannies around the world,
and refraining from committing atrocities and crimes against
humanity. Since those necessary changes were never in the cards, what
was inevitable was a grand public relations ploy, which is what we
got from the Obama regime, along with greater repression, the
continued perfection of the American Total Police State, and the
making routine of a program of global assassination, which is now a
permanent feature of this planet, thanks to Barack Hussein Obama. We
now have institutionalized state assassination on a weekly basis by
the most terrifyingly powerful nation on earth. Thus has this
egregious political hustler Obama reversed progress towards a
human civilization.

1] Mehsud
was killed in November 2013, just as the Pak civilian government was
trying to start peace talks with the Paki Taliban- probably a futile
endeavor, judging by past agreements with the medieval terrorist
movement and its overall fanaticism and intolerance.

The other reason
the terrorists offered as justification for the airport attack was
retaliation for military operations in North Waziristan by the Pak
military. The airport attack occurred on June 9th. On

June 10th,
the terrorists attacked the airport police academy and the Pak
military launched airstrikes on the Northwest tribal regions. The
U.S. should leave the (immoral and counterproductive) bombings of
civilian areas to the Pakis. If the Pak military wants to bomb
Pakistani civilians because they don’t trust their soldiers to
fight on the ground, at least the U.S. isn’t committing the war
crimes and discrediting itself further.

2]
Obama currently has ongoing drone assassination programs running
against at least three countries: Pakistan, Yemen, and
Somalia. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in these attacks. The
Obama regime deals with this fact in various ways: 1) ignoring the
fact; 2) denying it; 3) minimizing the number of civilians killed,
while refusing to name a number, address specific cases, or pay
compensation; 4) constantly emphasizing the “precision” and
“care” of the strikes; 5) saying nothing at all, and pretending
the whole matter is “secret.” Yes, these all contradict each
other, but that’s what you get with con men- a lot of contradictory
blather and lies.

It’s an obvious
lie to pretend they are killing exactly who they want to kill, and
they know who they’re killing in every case. Many times people are
killed on the basis of appearance alone. These are called, in
CIA-euphemism, “signature strikes.” “Signature” means “they
look like terrorists to us.” How might people in civilian garb in a
tribal area “look like” civilians? Well, if they’re a group of
men (women are kept indoors, as chattel, by these tribes.) Maybe they
have guns, as do many men in these areas. (As do many groups of men
on the ground in America- hunters, target shooters, “gun
enthusiasts.” Millions of American men would be deemed “terrorists”
and killed if the same criteria were to be applied here.)

As the Obama
regime has never admitted to a single error in its drone
“war,” can we then conclude that they deliberately blew up
wedding parties, as has happened repeatedly in Afghanistan and Yemen?
Or they meant to blow up a grandmother in a field? Or the 16
year old son of Anwar al-Alaki, and the son’s cousin, sitting
outside a cafe in Yemen? If Obama and his regime won’t say these
were mistakes, then we MUST conclude they were wanton
murders. They’ve had enough time to answer for these crimes, and
since they haven’t pleaded error, we are compelled
to call them deliberate acts of murder. Let’s have no more
mealy-mouthed circumlocutions offered up by people “questioning”
the drone strikes. It’s past time for denunciation, not
“questioning.”

A few year ago the
Wall Street Journal revealed on its front page that the
then-dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was getting the U.S. to
bump off his political rivals, even government officials, by telling
the U.S. they were “terrorists” and passing along targeting
information. The U.S. media ignored that aspect of the “drone
program” after that one article. Lately we learned, thanks to
Edward Snowden, that the NSA passes along cellphone data to be used
to kill whoever happens to be holding the phone. (Better not view any
jihadi websites on your phones, people!)

As I have observed
before, part of this is how Obama compensates himself for his
impotence in other areas. The power of life and death is a rush for
those who lust after power. Obama even bragged that he was a good
killer, in his capacity as weekly reviewer of the kill list- a boast
he saw fit to have planted in the media by one of his minions. Guess
he thought it would be good for his (gangster) image. If he thought
the reactionaries and militarists, whose political vehicle is the
Republican Party, would warm up to him, he was naïve about their
fanatical partisanship. His fondness for “special ops” recalls a
predecessor- Kennedy. Kennedy was smitten by the idea of U.S. state
terrorism, and took the various “special operations” units of the
military under his wing and expanded them. He also instituted a
torture training program under the cover of the “Alliance for
Progress,” an alleged program of social progress for Latin America
which was just a cynical program of shoring up U.S. imperialist
dominance against the Castro “threat.” Inside that program was
something called the “Office for Public Safety,” which sent U.S.
torture trainers like the notorious Dan Mitrione to Latin America to
train fascists there in torture techniques to be used on progressives
rounded up after the CIA gave them the victims’ names. (So much for
“Kennedy liberalism” and “Camelot”!) Former CIA operations
officer John Stockwell has revealed many details of Mitrione’s
sickening crimes. His talks are widely available, such as on
youtube.com, and he has authored books on the CIA.

Obama is an
example of how power corrupts, morally. Not that he was ever
moral- he’s an amoral hustler with the cunning to climb to the top
of the slippery pole of the U.S. political system and snag the top
prize. After he leaves office he will become a multimillionaire, and
impose insufferably pompous, smug, and hypocritical rhetoric on us. [MORE ON DRONES BELOW.]

3]
Organized brainwashing by the U.S. government goes back to at
least the regime of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), an evil, virulent
racist and the man who begat the modern U.S. police state. In order
to whip up public war fever to enter World War One (after he ran for
reelection in1916 on a peace platform, a double-cross repeated by his
Democratic successors Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Barack Obama in
2008) he created the Creel Commission, a group of professional
manipulators and indoctrinators. Wilson is also responsible for the
so-called “Espionage Act,” a repressive law he used to imprison
war opponents, and now used by Barack Hussein Obama to persecute
whistleblowers and government employees who talk out of turn.

Here are some
samples of what the U.S. government and media keep hidden under the
rug, namely the price paid by civilians in the regions under
surveillance and attack. But as with corporate pollution, the
perpetrators don’t care because it isn’t them who pay the price.
The only “cost” the U.S. cares about, maybe, a little, is dents
to its own image.

The Islamofascist movement sure doesn’t
look like it’s losing in the “war on terror” vs. the U.S. and
its various lackeys, clients, satrapies and allies-of-convenience (and
Frenemies like Pakistan). Suddenly the Iraqi regime of Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki has lost its grip on the Sunni regions of Iraq. This has
occasioned quiet panic in the Imperialist corridors of Washington,
D.C.

As well it might, since it is far too
late to salvage this situation, and application of U.S. military
power will only add more war crimes to the U.S.’ record while at
best only buying time for Maliki. At this point the only way to
minimize the suffering of the Iraqi people is partition of that
artificial nation cobbled together by British and French imperialists
long ago. But Maliki will opt for civil war to try and maintain his
malign grip on the nation.

Obama is rushing arms to al-Maliki.
Using his U.S.-supplied munitions, al-Maliki repeatedly bombed the
hospital in Fallujah. Just like his U.S. patrons did before him,
al-Maliki committed war crimes in that city as a matter of policy.

Obama says the seizure of Mosul and
thousands of square miles of territory by the “Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria” is a “wake up call” for al-Maliki. Vice
President Joe “Anita Hill is a Lying Slut” Biden, Jr. even called
Maliki to tell him this. [1]

Al-Maliki has been asking Obama for the
past month to bomb Iraq for him. Imagine, a country’s ruler asking
a foreign power to bomb his own country. Obama, so far, has declined.
But he’s sending an aircraft carrier and missile-armed escort ships
towards Iraq in case he changes his mind. [2]

Maliki has ordered
F-16 fighter jets from the U.S. How his non-existent air force could
fly and maintain these complex, advanced warplanes hasn’t been
explained. Obviously Americans would have to be the ground crews, at
a minimum. And I doubt if there are any Iraqi pilots trained on
F-16s.

Obama has sent
Maliki hundreds of Hellfire missiles, which are used by the
U.S. in assassination operations by drones, and can be fired from
other “platforms, which the New York Times claim the Maliki
regime has strapped to the wings of small Cessna propeller planes! No
explanation of how that works.[3]

U.S. officials,
from Obama on down, are squeaking advice to Maliki in public,
consisting of such fatuous remarks as “he needs to be more
inclusive,” “he needs to form a unity government,” “only the
Iraqis can sort this out,” and so on. It’s rather late for all
that. Maliki has systematically persecuted the Sunni population,
imprisoned them, arrested and forced their politicians and government
officials to flee, purged the government of Sunni officials,
cashiered competent Sunni generals and replaced them with incompetent
Shiite cronies, brutally repressed Sunni protests, arrested and
tortured Sunnis on a large scale, and generally behaved like Saddam
Hussein’s mirror image. He started down this path as soon as GEORGE
W. BUSH (remember him?) chose Maliki to be Iraq’s boss. Maliki
was boosted into power BY the U.S. Maliki and his gang have embezzled
billions of dollars and arrested any officials who objected.

It shouldn’t be
a surprise (yet the U.S. imperialists seem surprised nonetheless)
that the Iraqi army has turned out to be like the South Vietnamese
army- a sham, a paper tiger, that has no motivation to fight. Four of
its fourteen divisions evaporated like water on a hot tarmac before a
mere 4,000 or so Islamofascist “fighters.” They shucked off
their uniforms and threw away their weapons. And why not? They knew
they lacked leadership and logistical support. Die for the dictator
al-Maliki? No way!

But the
Islamofascists won’t take Baghdad. That is bluster on their part.
The city is far too huge, is largely Shiite now, and thousands there
are breaking out their Kalashnikovs and joining ad hoc
militias. The Sunni Islamofascists would meet their Waterloo if they
were foolish enough to enter Baghdad. Unfortunately they aren’t
foolish. They consistently show great tactical and strategic savvy,
sad to say. This is true in Syria as in Iraq. At least the Kurds have
officially taken over Kirkuk, so those oil resources won’t fall to
the Islamic Terror State. (The Islamofascists are already murdering
police and government workers in the cities they’ve seized. It’s
as if Christian Identity terrorists took over a U.S. city and
murdered postal workers who were Baptists.)

Meanwhile
incessant blowhard militarist John “Permanent POW” McCain is
attacking Obama for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq. (Obama couldn’t
get Bush-installed Iraqi boss Nuri al-Maliki to give immunity to U.S.
troops for crimes they would be sure to commit, thus Obama withdrew
U.S. military forces on the timetable set by Bush.
The GOP doesn’t seem to “remember” this. And the Democrats are
too craven to remind them. And of course the U.$. media won’t tell
people, except for a mention in the 20th
paragraph of a single story- literally the only mention I’ve come
across.) No word from any
Democrats blaming Bush for installing
al-Maliki. Instead we have lame Obama regime advice to al-Maliki to
“be more politically inclusive.” Is that a joke? Maliki
has systematically persecuted the Sunnis for several years now,
including even branding the erstwhile Sunni Vice President a
“terrorist,” arresting his bodyguards and forcing the VP to flee.
He has waged virtual war (and now actual war) on the Sunnis, gunning
down Sunni protesters, and with the uprisings of Sunnis he provoked
(which the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” Islamofascists have
taken advantage of) Maliki has been bombarding Sunni cities,
especially targeting the hospital in Fallujah for the past six
months, waging U.S.-style war against the civilian populace.

The U.S. military
laid the groundwork for a regime of secret police torture and
repression when they occupied Iraq. A former Colonel by the name of
James Steele, a sinister, Gestapo-like character, was brought in by
the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David “My Mistress is My
Biographer!” Petraeus. Petraeus knew Steele from El Salvador in the
1980s, where Steele was in charge of training Salvadorean military
death squads. Steele brought his methods to Iraq, setting up and
supervising Shiite terror units that rounded up Sunni “suspects”
for torture. Steele reported directly to Secretary of War Donald
Rumsfeld. The gory story is told in a (non-U.S., naturally, since
U.S. media don’t practice journalism, they practice propaganda)
documentary available on youtube.com. So the “democratic”
government of “respect for human rights” that the U.S. claimed to
be installing in Iraq was just another brutal torture dictatorship,
as per the usual U.S. habit. The U.S. is very experienced in setting
up such regimes. [4]

Hence it is
extremely disingenuous for U.S. officials, from Obama on down, to
prattle about “inclusiveness” and “respect for all groups”
and yada yada yada. Obama’s
latest cynical bit of propaganda is his statement that U.S. troops
invaded Iraq so the Iraqis could have a better future. If you go back
to Colin Powell’s pack-of-lies UN speech before the Iraq invasion,
and all the fear-mongering anti-Saddam diatribes by Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Rice, etc., claiming Iraq was an imminent threat to the
American populace, you get a reading on the deep sea depths of
Obama’s mendacity. And considering the numerous, documented
atrocities by the U.S. against defenseless Iraqi civilians, and the
huge Iraqi death toll, Obama’s absurd claim is stomach-churning.

In any event,
Al-Maliki hasn’t been content with packing the military hierarchy
with unqualified cronies and loyalists and purging the so-called
“security forces” of Sunnis. In addition to being “Prime
Minister,” he also appointed himself Minister of Defense, Minister
of the Interior, and National Security Adviser. So he’s a one-man
band of repression, controlling the men with the guns- the army and
secret police (aka “security forces” in the parlance of
contemporary political euphemism). But silly Americans lecture him
about “inclusivity” and “unity.” That’s as fatuous as
intoning “Assad must go.” Or saying Israeli “settlement”
building is “unhelpful” to an imaginary “peace process.” Or
slamming Russia for “destabilizing Ukraine” when it was the
U.S. that helped overthrow the government there, causing a schism in
the country. Who are such ridiculous rhetorical shows supposed to
fool? The U.S. political elite increasingly performs for itself in
its own Theater of the Absurd.

The U.S. media is
wringing its hands over the “loss” of the city of Fallujah, which
the U.S. regards as a U.S. “victory.” (“Part of American
military history” the anchor of CBS TV “news” intoned
reverentially June 12th. Actually part of the history of
U.S. military war crimes, the destruction of a city, systematic
attacks on hospitals etc., and the attempted extermination of all
males in their teens and older, what the U.S. calls “military age
males.” This in retaliation for the killing of four Blackwater
Company goons. So the U.S. outdid the vengeance the Nazis took on the
Czechs for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich, the wiping out of the
small town of Lidice and its entire population. That was only a few
hundred deaths.) We’re also getting stories about how hard
it is on American soldiers who invaded and wrecked Iraq (and killed a
minimum of over 100,000 Iraqis) to see their effort go down the
drain. Pity the poor imperialist warriors.

CBS reported
Obama “has been presented with a range of options” for bombing or
invading Iraq (which would be the third U.S. invasion of Iraq in 23
years). Obama put on his Hamlet act again, as he did with Syria,
saying “all options are on the table.” Simultaneously talking out
of the other side of his mouth, Obama rules out a U.S. ground
invasion. I guess it depends on what “all” means, like his
Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton once said it depends on what “is”
means. Most people know what these words mean- sorry that these two
products of elite Ivy League universities (and a Rhodes scholar in
Clinton’s case) don’t.

Instead of teasing
the militarists in America with hints of attacks he has no intention
of launching, which only makes them madder, it would be nice if Obama
would be honest for a change and say “there’s not much we can
do.” But that would be “weak.” American presidents are expected
to pound their chests and bellow like He-Men, because America is the
Most Powerful Nation on Earth. American jingoists- and there are
millions of them, contrary to the delusions of leftists- refuse to
recognize that American power has limits, that being able to blow up
the world or put men on the moon does not mean one’s nation is
omnipotent. Oh, and they believe the Vietnam War was lost because of
a stab-in-the-back by the pro-Commie U.S. media, with an assist from
traitorous draft dodgers.

1]
Reported by U.S. Gov’t radio propaganda network NPR, June 12th.

2] The
missiles on the ships are Tomahawk cruise missiles, highly accurate
ground attack weapons the U.S. has used to blow up such targets as
the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan (Bill Clinton committed that
crime) various other civilian and military targets, and “terrorists.”

The U.S. broadcast
media has repeatedly blared the news that the “aircraft carrier
George H.W. Bush” is being sent. U.S. propaganda media usually
don’t state the names of the carriers when they announce that U.S.
carriers are being sent somewhere. I don’t know what grotesque
motive they have here. That Bush is Bush the Elder, who attacked
Iraq, as his son did after him. The U.S. corporate propaganda media
also just told us that Bush the Elder went skydiving. This is part of
an ongoing propaganda campaign to put a rosy glow around him, as they
have already done with the fascist mass murderer Reagan.

The elder Bush is
a career criminal, deeply involved in U.S. terror operations in
Central America and Colombia, a key figure in the Reagan regime’s
criminal Iran-Contra conspiracy as vice president, and who later as
president issued pardons to his co-conspirators to block their
prosecution by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, whose outrage over
the pardons was and is mostly blacked out by the U.$. media.

There is
voluminous evidence of the criminal history of the Bush clan,
documented in books such as one by Kevin Phillips, and video
documentaries available on youtube.com. The Bush family stole two
presidential elections, surely a historically significant fact. The
two Bushes who (so far) became presidents are both members of the
sinister ruling class secret society Skull and Bones, based at Yale
University (CIA U.), as is John Kerry. (Thus did the bourgeoisie, in
2004, give the American people a choice between two members of the
same secret ruling class cabal for president. Heads they win, tails
we lose. They must have loved that coin toss.) Yet another Bush, Jeb,
who as Florida governor oversaw the theft of Florida for his brother
George in the 2000 presidential election, is now being bruited about
as presidential material for 2016. Greg Palast has extensively
exposed the criminal machinations of the GOP in Florida in that
election.

Prescott Bush,
George H.W. Bush’s father (the last president Bush’s grandfather)
was up to his eyeballs in financial dealings with the Nazis. The Bush
family then was quite racist also. Again, well-documented by others.

One more important
thing to mention: the elder Bush was also CIA Director, before he was
VP. In that role, he helped the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with a car bomb in
Washington, D.C. He helped smuggle the bomb maker, an American
fascist terrorist, Michael Vernon Townley, into the U.S. A week after
the murder, the CIA planted a piece in Newsweek, that revolting
criminal rag, “clearing” Pinochet of the murder. (This was in
Newsweek’s “Periscope” column and attributed to the
CIA.) Of course that was a lie- and not even plausible that one week
after the murders the CIA could know for sure it wasn’t the obvious
suspects who did it. There was also a Pinochet scheme to murder
then-Congressman Edward Koch (later a right-wing mayor of New York
City) for annoying him. The CIA knew about the plot and deflected it,
but never told Koch or the FBI etc. that the Chilean fascists were
trying to murder him, telling Koch only that he should be careful.

4] See the
revealing Guardian/BBC Arabic documentary “James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq,” at youtube.com, for a peek at the fascist
underbelly of U.S. imperialism that the U.S. media blacks out. The
story of Steele’s crimes against humanity in El Salvador and Iraq
are detailed therein.

Sunday, June 08, 2014

That seems very likely if we credit as
accurate the account in a Wall Street Journal article on the
Army Sergeant (neé
Private before two promotions given him while in captivity as an
apparent sop to his parents) traded after five years in the Taliban’s
talons for five ranking Taliban officials and commanders who were
imprisoned in the U.S. military gulag at Guantanamo Bay, occupied
Cuban territory. [1]

Promoting
Bergdahl to Sergeant was perhaps also a way to help justify swapping
five “high-value detainees” for him, as opposed for a trade for a
lowly Private. Maybe they should have made him a General. [2]

The
Wall Street Journal
account, based on interviews
with members of the Army unit Bergdahl lived with on the outpost in
Afghanistan he walked away from, states that Bergdahl frequently went
outside the American base to hang out with Afghan “police” at a
nearby outpost, and mused to his comrades about living among the
Afghans. One soldier says of Bergdahl: “I remember him asking me
what I thought it would be like to be with these people, how he could
see himself living in a culture like this, how it would be an
adventure to be like they are, running through the mountains.”

A
very telling quote. Bergdahl seems typical of a certain type of young
man, restless and full of energy, bored with the routine existence of
societies not in upheaval, seeking excitement. He was also an
emotional extremist, in the article’s telling, swinging from
wanting to kill Taliban to apparently romanticizing
at least Afghans generally
if not the designated foe.
Just before deployment to Afghanistan he asked his squad leader if he
could cut off the face of the first Taliban he killed and wear it as
a mask. (The squad leader’s
reply isn’t reported. I hope he told him no.) The article describes
his schizoid swings from exasperation at what he viewed as a too-soft
U.S. military strategy towards the Taliban to disenchantment with the
war.

But here’s the key fact: the
soldiers say that on the same day Bergdahl disappeared, two of the
Afghan “policemen” he fraternized with at the outpost
“mysteriously fled.” This leads to the obvious suspicion that he
asked them about blending into Afghan society or perhaps even joining
the Taliban, and they delivered him into Taliban captivity, probably
for money. [3]

This fact isn’t in the military
report on Bergdahl’s disappearance. On the other hand, while the
U.S. government has put it about that Bergdahl had a habit of
wandering off, his erstwhile comrades from Afghanistan had no
recollection of this, at least the ones the WSJ interviewed,
who presumably would know, as
this was a small outpost near the Pakistan border, not a major base.
[4]

Could this be another Benghazi-type
Obama regime deception? In the
Benghazi, Libya, killing of the U.S. ambassador and three U.S.
security guards there, the Obama regime rushed out with the false
story that the attack on the U.S. consulate was a spontaneous
reaction by an unorganized mob who were angry over a dopey
anti-Muslim video made in America by a Federal parolee with
mysterious funding. That story
was put out to try and stave
off anticipated political pain from the true story. It could be that
similar disinformation about Bergdahl merely being a guy with chronic
wanderlust is being told
to try and deflect or blunt criticism over the great deal the Taliban
got in the swap. So much better than Bergdahl being seen as a
deserter or traitor. (Which I’m not saying he is, just that he
looks more like
that when one deletes
the “prior wandering offs” from
the story. Personally I think he was an emotionally volatile,
immature young flake. But an empire can’t be too choosy about who
it enlists as its hired killers. Just look at the criminal scum the
French Foreign Legion welcomes with open arms- and provides with
pseudonyms to help hide
them! That’s a more extreme example to make the point. Look, is
wanting to kill and maim normal,
for
human beings?)

The
thesis of there being
another Obama spin operation
going on is buttressed by the fact that Bergdahl is being held
incommunicado in a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Bergdahl would
be likely to say something that undermines the Obama regime’s
“narrative,” especially around the circumstances of his
“disappearance.” [5]

Various media reports (e.g. NPR, New
York Times, the Daily
Beast) have stated that Bergdahl said he was held in a cage in
total darkness for several weeks following his two escape attempts
from them. (Hey, that’s a U.S. torture method too! So the U.S. and
the Taliban have something in common! Nothing like common ground for
bringing enemies together.) (See
footnote #5
below.)

But whatever Obama
would have done or not done, the Republicans and their media allies
would be attacking him. If he left Bergdahl in the Taliban’s
clutches, he’d be condemned by these same cynical partisans for
“abandoning an American soldier to terrorists.” And reportedly
those Taliban prisoners have been damaged by their twelve years in
captivity (mostly in solitary) at the tender mercies of the CIA and
U.S. military. One doesn’t recognize people he used to know (the
former Taliban deputy chief of “intelligence”). Apparently
they’re in pretty bad mental shape, and no doubt have physical and
brain damage from their years of torture and abuse. So there should
be no problem for Qatar to keep them on ice for the agreed-upon one
year. It’ll take them longer than that to psychologically recover
from their ordeal, if they ever do. [6]

So in a sense, the
“war on terror” is a war of Sadists vs. Sadists. Gee, which side
should we root for?

1] “Bergdahl’s Views
Shifted After First Taste of War,” Wall Street Journal, June
7, 2014, p.1. You can’t read it online unless you pay. Rupert
Murdoch instituted that policy after he bought the corporation that
owns the WSJ, Dow Jones, from a family that sits on the top
tier of the U.S. class system, the Bancrofts.

2] The New York Times,
in the next to last paragraph of a story, referred to the two
promotions as “automatic,” without explanation. If American POWs
are automatically promoted, I never heard of it before. “As Soldier Heals, Details Emerge Of His Captivity,” NY Times,
Sunday, June 8, 2014, pgs. 1 and 12.

3] I put “policemen”
in quotes not because I believe they were imposters, but because what
passes for “police” in Afghanistan does not meet a reasonable
definition of the word. Which is increasingly the case in the U.S.
too. “Corrupt gunmen” would be more accurate in the Afghan case.
Come to think of it, in the U.S. case too, given their penchant for
theft under the guise of “asset forfeiture,” and their increasing
tendency to murder and repress.

4] The New York Times
also reported that soldiers stationed with him in Afghanistan “said
they were unaware that he had previously wandered off the base, as
the internal Army review reported.” Maybe they were “unaware”
because it didn’t happen, huh Times? But the Times
leaves it at that, in one short, hidden paragraph, the 23rd
paragraph of a 30 paragraph story. Most of the time, the Times
bends over backward to protect the U.S. government and its
institutions. That’s why it’s so often tardy or entirely AWOL in
reporting scandals, ignoring them until they are widely reported
elsewhere and it has no choice but to weigh in, to manipulate
people’s attitudes and soften the blow to the establishment power
structure, as well as retain its own credibility as a newspaper.

Paragraph 22 consists of a single,
false sentence: “Just how and why Sergeant Bergdahl disappeared
remains a mystery to his fellow soldiers.”

If the Times had only said “some
of his fellow soldiers,” that might arguably be true. There’s
no “mystery” to those of his erstwhile colleagues who believe,
rightly or wrongly, that he deserted. And this evident attempt to
protect the Obama regime is undercut four paragraphs later in the
same story by a quote of Bergdahl’s provided by a Gerald Sutton,
who the Times identifies as someone “who knew Sergeant
Bergdahl from spending time together on their tiny outpost.” This
is the quote Sutton attributes to Bergdahl: “What would it look
like if I got lost in the mountains? Do you think I could make it to
China or India on foot?” To this Sutton adds “I genuinely thought
he was just kidding.” A reasonable if possibly mistaken assumption.
“Bergdahl Was In Unit KnownFor Its Troubles,” NY
Times, Sunday, June 8, 2014, pgs. 1 and 12.

5] Besides describing the
torture inflicted by the Taliban, The New York Times reported
on its front page that Bergdahl objects to being addressed as
“sergeant” in the military hospital in Germany where he is
currently being held in isolation. He’s being held there in part to
insulate him from the harsh attacks on Obama for exchanging five
important Taliban prisoners for him, and from the charges of
desertion that some of his former comrades and various media and
political poohbahs are leveling at Bergdahl himself. The Times
reports that he has received a letter from his sister but has not
replied. His family is being kept away from him, with the excuse that
his mental state prevents them from seeing him- a dubious rationale.
He is said to be physically well enough to travel. Obviously he is
being held virtually incommunicado in Germany for political reasons.
He is only allowed to speak to staff assigned to “treat” (and
sneakily interrogate) him. His family can’t even call him. Buried
in the third tolast paragraph of a seventeen paragraph
story the Times casually drops this stunner: “At some point,
he will speak by phone with his family, and be reunited with them.”
At some point he will speak with! Check the disingenuous
passive sense! He’s being held incommunicado. His next stop,
we are told, will be another Army “medical facility” in Texas,
where his family will be allowed to see him, supposedly. (The Times
phrased it as Bergdahl will “be reunited with them.”) NY
Times, “As Soldier Heals,”
op cit.

6] Details on the former Taliban prisoners’ condition was reported by the BBC, and
picked up by NPR, June 8.

Let’s let the very funny and incisive
cartoonist Brian McFadden have the last word for today:

Saturday, June 07, 2014

The latest on the U.S.-created Ukraine "crisis:" Obama now demands that Putin make the eastern Ukrainians surrender to the coup government and disarm them! Or else Russia will be hit with tougher sanctions. The Eurolackeys supposedly are going along with this.

I say insane because it is insane to demand that Russia attack its own national interests and help the U.S. take over a country on its border. But that's what the U.S. is doing.

Maybe Putin should have demanded that Obama disarm the fascist rioters who were killing police before they overthrew the elected Ukrainian president. That at least would have been a reasonable demand, if unrealistic considering what an aggressive nation the U.S. is.

The top organ of U.S. establishment propaganda, the New York Times, used these phrases to describe the latest U.S. diktat: "President Obama effectively set a one-month deadline for Moscow to
reverse its intervention in Ukraine and help quash a pro-Russian
separatist uprising or else he said it would face international
sanctions far more severe than anything it had endured so far;" "demanded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recognize and
negotiate directly with the newly elected leader of Ukraine, stop the
flow of fighters and arms across the border and press separatists to
disarm, relinquish seized public buildings and join talks with the
central authorities in Kiev;" "'Russia continues to have a responsibility to convince them to end their
violence, lay down their weapons and enter into a dialogue with the
Ukrainian government,' Mr. Obama said at a news conference alongside
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain after a meeting of leaders of
the Group of 7 industrial powers. 'On the other hand, if Russia’s
provocations continue, it’s clear from our discussions here that the G-7
nations are ready to impose additional costs on Russia.'” [1]

In other words, Russia is being required to aid the U.S. takeover of Ukraine! Now whatever one thinks of that U.S. takeover, it is insane to demand that Russia stab itself in the back and help the U.S. cause major damage to Russian interests. This is the demand of an international extortionist. And I don't write this as a friend of Russia or the authoritarian Putin, just as a person who isn't crazy from drinking the propaganda Kool-Aid of the Western media and governments. That stuff must be laced with some powerful hallucinogens!